[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post
Do you think that people who invent things with very destructive consequences are blinded to the downsides of it more by money or more by scientific curiosity?
I think the downsides are not always immediately obvious. Coal-fired electricity looks a lot more attractive in 1882 when there's literally only one such power plant and the global population is like 18% its present value. TNT was invented as a yellow dye, and it's so stable its usefulness as an explosive wasn't discovered until thirty years later.
We have this collective mental image, promoted by simplifications of historical narratives, that the inventor is a lone genius who through his labor produces an artifact and all its consequences in a single moment in time, and without which the thing would never be invented. Pretty much every point in that narrative is wrong. New technologies are the culmination of many different discoveries; there are enough very smart people working at the cutting edge of these fields that if one of them did not discover the principles behind these inventions, another almost certainly would sooner or later; and the exact applications of new technologies, nevermind how they will change society when those applications are utilized, often take years or decades to discover.
Now, I think there is an extent to which, as a working scientists, you can reasonably be held to account for the work you do. If you work at the Acme National Horrible Death By Chemical Weapons Laboratory, and invent a new, horrible chemical weapon, you do not get to go "oh no!" in shock when somebody dies to your horrible chemical weapon. And sometimes scientists do have a pretty good idea of how their technology will be used--the Haber Process was originally invented to manufacture fertilizers, but its application to the manufacturing of explosives was pretty clear to Fritz Haber, and he joined the German effort to develop deadlier chemical weapons pretty enthusiastically.
Men like Haber seem historically to be motivated not by intrinsic greed, but by the things which motivate us all: the desire to provide for their loved ones, the approval of their peers and the respect of their colleagues, and their status in society. The problem with respect to scientists who know damn well what they're doing isn't that everybody working at the Acme National Horrible Death By Chemical Weapons Laboratory is greedy and the job pays too much; the problem is that society, by and large, respects you and looks up to you and fetes you at public events and talks about what a patriot and a community leader you are if you do really well at inventing new, horrible chemical weapons.